Markie reached into the candy bowl, then went with her son to the end of the walk, hands behind her back. Bringing them forward, she bent down to Lola. “Here, Miss Secret Genie Ghost. I want to be the first person to put something in your pumpkin. These were Jesse’s idea, by the way.”
Lola pulled her sheet off to get a better view as Markie dropped three Hershey bars into the orange plastic container. Screeching, Lola threw her arms around Markie’s neck, pressing a sticky cheek against her. It felt to Markie as though the child had just glued them together. It wasn’t the makeup—she could feel that, too, and it was slippery, not sticky.
Lola’s neck and arms and hair had a filmy feel to them, and she had a definite unclean smell about her, although perhaps because she was only eight, it was more sweet than repulsive. She smelled like mushed apples and wet hay, and while it wasn’t something Markie would want to bottle and sell, it was far nicer than the preteen body odor that used to settle in the stairwells at Jesse’s old school.
Despite the smell of her and the stickiness, Markie held on tight. Hugging Lola reminded her of how it used to be when Jesse was her age, the forceful way he’d throw himself at her, shoot his arms around her, and hold on like he never wanted to let go. No self-consciousness, no concern about whether someone might be watching. It got so much harder as they got bigger. Jesse was skinny, but he had his father’s broad shoulders, so Markie had to approach him from a careful angle in order to get her arms right around him, which only made the entire process that much more awkward and unpleasant for him.
“Thank you a big billion billion!” Lola said, pressing her cheek tighter against Markie’s.
“Which is not, in fact, the highest number in the world,” Jesse said, in a way that made clear he was continuing a conversation they’d had before.
“Is so,” Lola said.
She tried to pull away, but she and Markie were stuck fast by whatever was under her makeup. Lola giggled and pulled harder, coming free, and Markie felt a cold, empty space where the child’s body had been pressed against her. She told herself she was being ridiculous—she should be relieved to be free of the smell and grime.
Jesse picked up the discarded sheet from the ground and held it out for her, and Lola wriggled into it.
“Frappez la rue!” Lola said. “That’s ‘hit the road’ in French,” she informed Markie as they turned for the sidewalk.
“Not exactly,” Jesse said. “It doesn’t—”
“Directly translate,” Lola finished for him. “But I still like to say it.”
“Just don’t—” he started.
“Say it in front of Mrs. Saint,” Lola finished. “I know. Je pas stupid.”
“Je ne suis pas stupide,” he corrected, and Markie didn’t know whether to feel pride or dismay at his newfound French-language skills.
Lola punched him in the side and whispered something Markie couldn’t hear, and the two of them bickered their way down the block as Markie turned back to the house.
Stepping past the carved pumpkin, she thought about the Halloween nights of her childhood—being dragged too fast around their block by an impatient Lydia while her father remained at work, determined not to return home until “the whole ridiculous waste of money and good molars” was over. “There,” Lydia would say, “we went all the way around the block. That’s more than enough candy for your waistline and for your teeth. And more than enough time for Mommy to have to witness all those mannerless imps grabbing their candy and running, without a pleasant ‘Good evening’ or even a simple ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you.’”
Markie was allowed to dress in one of four Lydia-approved costumes: nurse, doctor, teacher, or first female president. She was permitted one candy from her pumpkin while they racewalked around the block, one when they got home, and one each dinnertime thereafter until her pumpkin was empty. With her mother’s supervision—the kind that always ended in “Here, why don’t I just fix that part. In fact, I’ll just finish it for you”—she was given the chance to carve one small pumpkin. More of a gourd, really, the size of a baseball. Clayton didn’t like the look of large pumpkins on people’s doorsteps once the squirrels got to them.
There were no indoor decorations of any kind, though Markie was allowed to display Halloween-related school art projects on the fridge for the same seven-day time allotment Clayton permitted for all drawings, stories, or other items she brought home. Once the week was up, the “clutter,” as he referred to it, went into the garbage. “This is a house, not a nest of pack rats.”
Inside the bungalow, Markie switched off the porch light and went to the family room to retrieve her book from the couch. She had an hour of reading time in bed before the kids returned. As she bent to pick up her novel, she saw Patty’s pink high heels near the door where Lola had kicked them off, and it occurred to her that she had been luckier than Lola—at least Lydia had taken her around the block each year and helped her with her costume, no matter how uncreative.
Markie set her book down. In the front hall, she flipped the porch light back on, casting the front of the house in a welcoming glow, and racing to the basement as fast as her crutches would allow, she found the box labeled HALLOWEEN. For the next sixty minutes, anytime she had a break from answering the door and handing candy to tiny Dorothys with red shoes, middle-school grim reapers, and the occasional high-school “hobo,” she strung pumpkin lights around the kitchen window, set out her collection of ceramic witches and ghosts on the counter, and dangled big plastic spiders from the ceiling, along with the tissue-body ghosts Jesse had made in first grade.
On the fridge, she used her entire magnet collection to post a decade’s worth of “scary” drawings he had created each October during his early childhood: green witches with warty noses and hairy chins and too many googly eyes, graveyards filled with monsters and zombies, the Headless Horseman. As a final touch, she tacked to the guest-room door the construction-paper skeleton with movable joints Jesse had so proudly brought home in third grade, and she set an electric jack-o’-lantern on the table beside the guest bed.
Lola squealed when she walked in the house and saw the decorations. Dropping her pumpkin, she ran into the kitchen, touched each of the ceramic ghosts and witches, studied every single piece of artwork on the fridge, and jumped up to try to touch each dangling ghost and spider. When Markie suggested the girl might want to check out the guest room, Lola yelped and raced up the stairs.
“Wait!” Jesse called after her. “You don’t even know where—”
An excited shriek let him know she had found the room just fine.
“Thanks, Mom,” he said. “The place looks great.” He set one of the dangling spiders spinning. “I’d forgotten about all this stuff.”